SAN question again

Way back in June I had asked some starter questions about SANs to start getting some quotes and and budgeting done.

Fast forward to now at the speed of Government and we are finally approved to purchase a unit. SAN for a 3 VMWare host, 60VM environment.

At this point I have a couple quotes from Dell, a couple from EMC, one from IBM and one from HP.

IBM DS3524 I've written off for lack of functionality vs. price. Equipped with the same storage capacity as the Dell units it does less and costs more.HP P2000 I've written off for the absurdly high price. At half the storage it's as much as the IBM and Dell units.The first EMC unit I've written off as well since it is not much different in spec than what we are upgrading from.

The EMC is obviously the cheapest, and any one of these will give us the performance and capacity to grow into. The PS6100XV is the most expensive, but not by much. Between the EMC and the PS6100XV is $4K.EMC does deduping and compression and list their cache levels on their storage controllers. I can't find any info on the Dell units in this regard.

Dell spent more time working with me to evaluate the performance needs we have, but I think EMC proposed a much more accurate solution even with a quick conversation.

Anyway, as I mentioned in my other thread this is really my first sourced and bought support SAN, so I am really green with the companies involved and the systems in question. This is mostly a "working through my head" post.Any advice or comments about this are welcome to help guide me along.

The equallogic's are going to give you more performance from a pure spindle standpoint. No dedupe in equallogic either. The EMC will give you more space, not sure if that is a concern. Not sure if the vnxe does autotiering or not, don't see it in the quick search I did.

Anyway, how much storage do you currently use, how much comes with each of the units you are considering, how much growth is anticipated in the next 5 years, etc.?

Not sure how I missed seeing the cache levels... They are right there in the first line of the controller description. Found it now.

We'll have provisioned out at the start about 5.5TB with at least .5-.7 TB growth in a year. Although the estimates of growth have proven to be short the last couple of years.

afidel wrote:

The VNX(e) doesn't do dedupe that will be of any use for a VM environment, it's file level, not block level, not sure about the state of compression.

Good to note, the dedup and compression might be of little use to us. Even if we fire up an NFS store, it will be ISO images and very likely little to gain out of compression.

akro wrote:

It sounds like there is something wrong with your P2000 quote....

Normally those are incredible inexpensive especially compared to a VNXe.

Did you build it from the web or have VAR quote it? List price is always way higher than it should be...

That was from a VAR. List price on the bare unit of the P2000 is crazy high, as high as an equiped VNXe. VAR price on the bare unit is not nearly as high, but still considerably more than EMC or Dell are offering.

I'll ask a question since you mention it's your first SAN - why are you buying one?

If you went with Essentials Plus and specced your hosts right you'd could use VMware's VSA or spend a little more on HP's StoreVirtual and have a clustered storage which would be pretty much bulletproof vs. the single point of failure which you have in a single SAN.

Don't misunderstand me, VSA's aren't for everyone, but I know it's very easy to think "I need a SAN" and there aren't too many vendors/VAR's out there who are going to turn down the opportunity to quote for one.

I'll ask a question since you mention it's your first SAN - why are you buying one?

If you went with Essentials Plus and specced your hosts right you'd could use VMware's VSA or spend a little more on HP's StoreVirtual and have a clustered storage which would be pretty much bulletproof vs. the single point of failure which you have in a single SAN.

Don't misunderstand me, VSA's aren't for everyone, but I know it's very easy to think "I need a SAN" and there aren't too many vendors/VAR's out there who are going to turn down the opportunity to quote for one.

Used VSA, didn't like them. A suitable VSA setup at this point would also entail replacing multiple hosts or buying storage shelves and SAS or FC to get the VSA loaded onto through the hosts. We are structured in terms of host configuration to utilize an iSCSI SAN, as this isn't our first SAN; this is our first vendored and supported SAN.

At any rate, I'm assuming that around $20k is too high? Otherwise, if you want to look at HP still, you could look into the 3PAR 7000 series. I believe base list price is around $16-17k.

$20K is right in the ball park of where we are looking. The P2000 was right in there, but with half the storage.Dell with 24x600 10K SAS was $800 less than HP with 12x600 10K SAS.

And if you never need more capacity/performance than the Dell gives you it's probably the better deal, however, if you DO need more then Dell's answer is buy another $20k array versus buying a couple thousand in drives for the P2000 and at worst another shelf. I've always been a buy what I need today but have room to grow kind of guy when it comes to storage because there is ALWAYS another unplanned project that blows out your storage predictions (at least the places I've worked or consulted at). Dell also has the MD series which from a design perspective is very similar to the P2000.

At any rate, I'm assuming that around $20k is too high? Otherwise, if you want to look at HP still, you could look into the 3PAR 7000 series. I believe base list price is around $16-17k.

$20K is right in the ball park of where we are looking. The P2000 was right in there, but with half the storage.Dell with 24x600 10K SAS was $800 less than HP with 12x600 10K SAS.

And if you never need more capacity/performance than the Dell gives you it's probably the better deal, however, if you DO need more then Dell's answer is buy another $20k array versus buying a couple thousand in drives for the P2000 and at worst another shelf. I've always been a buy what I need today but have room to grow kind of guy when it comes to storage because there is ALWAYS another unplanned project that blows out your storage predictions (at least the places I've worked or consulted at). Dell also has the MD series which from a design perspective is very similar to the P2000.

At the end of the day I've opted for the EMC. One of the big factors was exactly what you are saying: Need more room with Dell? Buy another EQL. The solution with EMC they proposed leaves me some room for adding IOPS or capacity without needing a ton of money.

At any rate, I'm assuming that around $20k is too high? Otherwise, if you want to look at HP still, you could look into the 3PAR 7000 series. I believe base list price is around $16-17k.

The 7000 series seriously starts under $17K? Does that include any controllers or drives? I really liked 3PAR when I was looking for a new platform, but my VAR couldn't manage to get the F200 down under $80K without sacrificing decent warranty support or dropping down under 24 spindles.

I know that the 7000-series was created to push their way down-market, but if they've got it down to a quarter the previous cost, that's... frankly rather difficult to believe.

At the end of the day I've opted for the EMC. One of the big factors was exactly what you are saying: Need more room with Dell? Buy another EQL. The solution with EMC they proposed leaves me some room for adding IOPS or capacity without needing a ton of money.

But that just means you're "overbuying" controller performance from the beginnning. So you're buying a different size "building block".

Unless final capacity would have been a concern, I'd have gone with the PS6100XV. Primarily because if this is your first SAN it's going to give the most predictable performace across the entire array even in a cache exhaustion scenario. Unless the dotted line has been signed, I'd at least get upgrade cost quotes from EMC and/or get gurantees for them rolled into the purchase agreement. Come upgrade time they know you're a captive market and having to rely on the VAR/EMC's good side is rarely going to work out well for you.

And I'll 3rd the puzzlement over the P2000 quote. Different region, but the last P2000 quote I had, the 10GbE SFP's cost more than the array head/chassis, and the disks were pretty heavily discounted as well. But maybe the VAR/HP are trying to push customers towards the new 3PAR units now and not being quite as generous with the P2000 as they have in the past.

Did there expansion option include support on any additional shelves/disks you purchase?

Yes.

Big Wooly Mammoth wrote:

I think you would have gotten better performance from the PS6100XV but the expansion point is a valid one. You do, however, increase bandwidth and cache every time you add another Eql shelf.

I don't doubt the PS6100XV would have performed better. I had doubt that we would hit that performance need in 5 years. The EMC gives us a bit of a bandaid option if we need it. In futre we may be building another office building on site, which would up our requirements of storage and IOPS, but we decided that given the cost of the project if we do go through with it we will just factor in the potential SAN upgrade/replacement/addition at that time. At this point the new building is to early and to uncertain as to it's fate.

chalex wrote:

ut that just means you're "overbuying" controller performance from the beginnning. So you're buying a different size "building block".

And? I don't really want to under buy my need, or buy exactly what I need for today. I need something for a few years.

Big Wooly Mammoth wrote:

Did you get a quote for a PS4100XV?

I did. Their price on the PS6100XV was low enough that I would have gone to the PS6100XV without a thought.

macker0407 wrote:

Unless final capacity would have been a concern, I'd have gone with the PS6100XV. Primarily because if this is your first SAN it's going to give the most predictable performace across the entire array even in a cache exhaustion scenario. Unless the dotted line has been signed, I'd at least get upgrade cost quotes from EMC and/or get gurantees for them rolled into the purchase agreement. Come upgrade time they know you're a captive market and having to rely on the VAR/EMC's good side is rarely going to work out well for you.

Final capacity in the long run was something that was a concern. Or growth in datastore size has exploded in the last two years. If I assume it will remain stagnant or only slightly increase then space was a non issue, but with that assumption I may have found myself facing a capital group trying to get another lump of money as the EQL ran out of space. With EMC I can expand at minimal cost. And again, this isn't our first SAN; it's the first vendored SAN.

Big Wooly Mammoth wrote:

Also, how many years of service did you get quoted? If you went with less than 5, I'd get your quotes updated.

I'd hate to spend $20,000 on a SAN and only have it covered for 3 years.

We only have 3 years as that is our IT policy on equipment that is considered high demand or high use. At that point it is replaced and moved to a different role or sold off. Come 3 years time I will be putting out RFQ's again and looking at my options. At that point we may consider extending the service agreement, but until then I will stick with policy guidelines.

In response to the P2000 price I can't really offer much expatiation. Price was from a VAR and I did tell then that it seemed really high in cost given the other quotes that I received from other vendors. Their lose if they can't bother to try and compete for my business.

With EMC I can expand at minimal cost. And again, this isn't our first SAN; it's the first vendored SAN.

My point was only that by adding more disk to the EMC unit, you're not adding more CPU and cache and network ports, like you would with an additional EQL unit. So it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Of course it's cheaper to add only additional capacity (without adding other components).

The EMC may well be better for your use case, if you don't need the additional performance in the future, but just need capacity.

My point was only that by adding more disk to the EMC unit, you're not adding more CPU and cache and network ports, like you would with an additional EQL unit. So it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Of course it's cheaper to add only additional capacity (without adding other components).

The EMC may well be better for your use case, if you don't need the additional performance in the future, but just need capacity.

CPU power shouldn't ever be a concern at the scale I am working with and cache and network ports can be added to the EMC unit. The Dell unit was lower cache and was what it was. The storage controllers should have the capacity for the amount that I might have to add. If they don't then I've entered that point where it has come from building a new building and am going to be likely budgeting for a whole host cluster and SAN.

Of course if I do need to add the EMC will quickly surpass the Dell in cost to reach what would likely be near equal performance. Thems the breaks. I honestly think in the long run neither of the options I was picking from would have been a wrong choice, but time may prove me wrong.

I mention it because you say you're throwing up a new building onsite so if you even have the vaguest thought that you might want to put another unit there and replicate, I'd look at the licensing implication now.

Before even getting into SAN vendors, my primarily concerns are about this "60 VMs on 3 hosts with a single SAN" thing.

What are your current space needs (actual used, not total free space)?What is your estimated growth rate for existing VMs (annual for 3-5 years)?How many VMs do you add per year?What are your vCPU and vRAM needs? Expansion needs?What are your IOPS needs?

Those are just to get an idea of host count and SAN sizing. Then you still have to determine things like replication and recovery needs. These are basic infrastructure questions that I assume have already been done, but want to ensure this is the case.

I mention it because you say you're throwing up a new building onsite so if you even have the vaguest thought that you might want to put another unit there and replicate, I'd look at the licensing implication now.

Already done. It's not cheap, but the likely hood of needing it at this point is pretty slim. Slim enough that having it included with the Dell wasn't of much value to us.

Before even getting into SAN vendors, my primarily concerns are about this "60 VMs on 3 hosts with a single SAN" thing.

Why would your concern be on something that is not with the current topic?

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What are your current space needs (actual used, not total free space)?

Answered above. 5.5TB

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What is your estimated growth rate for existing VMs (annual for 3-5 years)?

Answered above. 0.5-0.7TB a year.

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How many VMs do you add per year?

We'll be adding in a few more, which were accounted for in the 5.5TB figure.

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What are your vCPU and vRAM needs?

Irrelevant for this topic.

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Expansion needs?

Covered above for storage. CPU/RAM is irrelevant to this topic.

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What are your IOPS needs?

Sustained is relatively small at around 350, but with considerably larger peaks coming from large part CAD assemblies being opened.

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Those are just to get an idea of host count and SAN sizing. Then you still have to determine things like replication and recovery needs. These are basic infrastructure questions that I assume have already been done, but want to ensure this is the case.

Don't worry, we are not new to hypervisor clusters. We just have never done a vendored SAN. Up until this point we have always done white box builds with a Linux or Solaris core. At that point we build or added what we needed, be it iSCSI, fibre channel or NFS. We opted for a vendored solution as we are under staffed and don't want to commit the time to building and properly supporting an upgraded SAN as our current one just isn't suitable anymore. We've outgrown it and our write latencies are getting out of hand.

With the purchase of this SAN, a couple of our other white box SAN's are going to be merged into a single larger unit, reconfigured with Napp-it and then connected to an XCP cluster.

With all due respect, everything revolves around resource needs. I am not a VAR/reseller/integrator. I do sell BCDR software, but you'll note I didn't even bring that up. I couldn't care less about selling you anything, I'm just giving feedback relevant to a virtualized environment (and yes, everything is relevant when it comes to those).

Also you left out RAID level; I forgot to ask as well so... my bad.

I would not at all ignore replication as brought up by hutchingsp. Your likelihood of needing it right now may be slim, but you're looking at a 3 year time period, here. I also didn't see any mention of ease-of-management, which (IMO) the Dell EqualLogic platform beats EMC out on.

Spindle-count looks fine for your current IOPS needs. Those will grow over time as well, but you look covered for a while by my calcs.

With all due respect, everything revolves around resource needs. I am not a VAR/reseller/integrator. I do sell BCDR software, but you'll note I didn't even bring that up. I couldn't care less about selling you anything, I'm just giving feedback relevant to a virtualized environment (and yes, everything is relevant when it comes to those).

Yes everything is related, but that does not automatically create relevance. On topic for what I was after: the SAN was it.OT: You don't happen to be a reseller for Veeam do you? I have started looking at some of the Veeam products. (I appreciate the irony of this question at this point, but it is a serious question.)

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I would not at all ignore replication as brought up by hutchingsp. Your likelihood of needing it right now may be slim, but you're looking at a 3 year time period, here.

I didn't ignore it, I infact I addressed it in the reply to hutchingsp. Dell came with replication, EMC it can be licensed. I am not bothering with it at this time as the likely hood of needing it within 3 years is incredibly slim. If I thought replication was a higher chance of being needed I would have gone to the Dell.

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I also didn't see any mention of ease-of-management, which (IMO) the Dell EqualLogic platform beats EMC out on.

Coming from DSS and Napp-it systems, both Dell and EMC are worlds ahead in terms of ease of use than what we are coming from. EMC gave me a live demo of management, and it was very straight forward.

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Spindle-count looks fine for your current IOPS needs. Those will grow over time as well, but you look covered for a while by my calcs.

That's what I am figuring. The only thing that may come along to really create a surge in demand will be if we go ahead with the building construction, but if we do then it's not a big deal as I already have covered that with the VP that we will budget for the changes we need in the SAN and cluster setup.

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What % reads vs writes?

70/30 in favour of reads.

I apologize for being snide this morning. I've been trying to tone down my post but I can't get past my mood very well this morning. Regardless of my demeanor I do still appreciate the discussion.

I don't work for Veeam but in the SMB space they're OK for VM backups. Nothing spectacular and they tend to blow up around 100 VMs and up (heard firsthand from 3 separate customers of theirs at the latest VMUG I worked this past Thursday).

I work at Zerto, but I don't push it around on here. Feel free to check us out, though our focus is BC/DR not backups.

I don't work for Veeam but in the SMB space they're OK for VM backups. Nothing spectacular and they tend to blow up around 100 VMs and up (heard firsthand from 3 separate customers of theirs at the latest VMUG I worked this past Thursday).

I work at Zerto, but I don't push it around on here. Feel free to check us out, though our focus is BC/DR not backups.

I'll check Zerto out when I'm back at the office. Disaster recovery is an area I know we are lacking.